Nothing puts a damper on your workplace Halloween festivities quite like an imminent firing — although I do have a fun story about a woefully interrupted Chrismukkah luncheon I should probably save for another forum. It's a credit to this show that in the midst of all my chuckling over Dwight's costume and the unfortunately vacuumed-up party decorations, deep down I was pretty darn nervous about possibly losing one of these characters. Which is why that cliff-hanger of a commercial break that made it look like Jim was on the chopping block led to this living-room scene: me staring slack-jawed at the television and demanding aloud, "So help me, Michael Scott, if you fire Jim I will storm out of this office so fast it'll make your head swim." And then I remembered that I don't actually work at Dunder-Mifflin, got embarrassed, and went to the fridge for a composure-regaining soda. (While we're at it, let's just get all my humiliating Office-watching quirks out on the table.
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Question: I was only a kid when The Day After was filmed in my town, but I remember it being a big deal with my brother and my dad. Was it a big hit?
Answer: Well, "hit" sort of implies that everyone had a ball taking in the depiction of nuclear annihilation as seen through the lens of your hometown, Maria, but I can tell you that a heck of a lot of people watched.
In fact, when ABC broadcast the groundbreaking (no pun intended), graphic movie in November 1983, it was the highest-rated made-for-TV movie shown to date, racking up a whopping 46 share, which means 46 percent of all TV sets in use at the time. (For all you detail lovers, it topped 1977's Little Ladies of the Night, which had a 36.9 share, and was the second-highest-rated movie of any kind to that point, beaten only by a 47.6 earned by Gone with the Wind in 1976. Trust me: Such number
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What do you do when your intergalactic starship almost crashes and burns? After UPN came thisclose to canceling his space opera, Enterprise executive producer Rick Berman wisely reached back into the Star Trek franchise's glory days for inspirational fuel. And you won't believe what he dug up. Hold on to your phasers, Trekkers...
Remember the Eugenic Wars that spawned the evil Khan (aka Ricardo Montalban) and his followers in the camp classic Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan? That ancient conflict is back. And for an extra bonus, so is Next Generation star Brent Spiner, who not only played the adorable android Data, but also his genius creator, Dr. Soong.
In a three-episode story arc this season, Spiner will play Soong's great-grandfather, "an almost Hannibal Lecter-like bad guy," Berman previews. "He's a brilliant and dangerous scientist who messed with some genetically enhanced and outlawed Eugenic em
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